A Toke Too Far

It wasn't the Pentagon Papers, but give the New York Times and reporter David D. Kirkpatrick credit for bamboozling sad-sack author Doug Wead (The Raising of a President) into playing tapes he secretly recorded with then-Texas governor George W. Bush before his 2000 presidential election. Kirkpatrick's Feb. 20 front-pager didn't offer much juicy material, although the inference that Bush "tried" marijuana has a lot of liberals clucking, but some of the anecdotes are noteworthy in an historical footnote sort of way.

Steve Forbes won't be too happy, one imagines, with Bush's supposedly private conversations with Wead, an adviser to the president's father. Calling Forbes "too preppy" and "mean spirited" to win over Evangelical voters, Bush said, in reference to the GOP primaries five years ago, "Steve Forbes is going to hear this message from me. I will do nothing for him if he does to me what he did to Dole [in 1996]. Period. There is going to be a consequence. He is not dealing with the average, you know, 'Oh gosh, let's all get together after it's over.' I will promise you, I will not help him. I don't care. And he further boasted, "[Forbes] can forget Texas. And he can forget Florida [where his brother was governor]. And I will sit on my hands."

Bush is resolute and holds a grudge, but he's no political dummy. Had Forbes won his 300-to-one shot in 2000, Bush would not only have delivered Texas, but might've wound up as the publisher's running mate, figuring (like John Edwards did with John Kerry) that a respectable showing would make him the front-runner for 2004.

Bush also takes shots at Dan Quayle ("He's gone ugly on me, man"), Al Gore ("pathologically a liar") and like most everyone in the political world, prematurely dismissed John McCain's appeal to independent voters (and the media).

Still, Kirkpatrick admits: "The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush. Many of his taped comments foreshadow aspects of his presidency, including his opposition to both anti-gay language and recognizing same-sex marriage, his skepticism about the United Nations, his sense of moral purpose and his focus on cultivating Christian voters."

That's what you call a smoking water pistol.

Hundred-Dollar Medved

It's not often I agree with the Times' Maureen Dowd, but her recent spat with film critic Michael Medved over Clint Eastwood is worth considering. Most of the cringe-inducing rhetoric in Dowd's Feb. 6 column is her standard and untruthful pap-the claim that Americans live in a "hypermoralistic atmosphere" is ludicrous, considering that freedom of expression has never been more abundant than today-but I agree that Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby was a "dazzling" film. The first 15 minutes were lugubrious, but the remainder was riveting, on a par with the director's Unforgiven and maybe even Scorsese's Raging Bull.

Dowd slams Medved and Rush Limbaugh for "howl[ing] that Dirty Harry playing Dr. Kevorkian sends a positive message about euthanasia." And indeed, in a Feb. 17 Wall Street Journal defensive piece, the prissy Medved says the movie "portrays premeditated murder as the ultimate gift of love." Euthanasia's a complicated issue and Million Dollar Baby, with Eastwood agonizing over his decision, suffering at church, doesn't pretend to issue a unilateral endorsement. Medved points out that the New York Observer's Andrew Sarris said that "no movie in my memory has depressed me more," as if to justify his stance. What does that prove?

The Last Picture Show, one of the finest films of the 70s, was hardly uplifting-aside from introducing Hank Williams to a new generation-but that didn't detract from its brilliance. Likewise for the early-90s masterpiece The Grifters, with stunning and disturbing performances from John Cusack and Angelica Huston.

James Wolcott, on his naughty blog, also whacked Medved, with considerably more force than Dowd, who doesn't have a lot in the credibility bank. On Feb. 17, Wolcott says, "Michael Medved is an idiot. He has a wet sock for a brain. A thumbless grasp of the issues and a propensity for lachrymose whimpering when he doesn't get his way? [Million Dollar Baby is] too sophisticated for Medved's reductive, nursery-lesson mind? To vulgarize it as disguised propaganda is to miss its artistry entirely, but then again to Medved, art is something that should carry warning labels so that gullible doofuses (his target audience) won't be lured astray."

Wolcott is nasty and entertaining; although he ignores that his own audience at Vanity Fair has a disproportionate number of "doofuses." That's not his fault; he goes where the circulation and dollars lead him. But Wolcott does lapse into a bit of "nursery-lesson" thinking himself when combating Medved's stupid claim that the relatively modest box-office take for Million Dollar Baby-in comparison to Academy Award competitor The Aviator-is relevant. "According to Box Office Mojo," Wolcott writes, "72% of those who saw Million Dollar Baby graded it an A. Of those who saw Aviator, only 54% gave it an A. The People have spoken, Medved. They find Million Dollar Baby guilty of being excellent. So quit pretending that Hollywood is 'out of touch' with the audience, when it is you and your mustache who no speaka their language."

Next thing you know, Wolcott will be using Entertainment Weekly as a back-up.

The Nation Whiffs

The Village Voice's Jarrett Murphy wrote an interesting online "Press Clips Extra" item on Feb. 17, detailing the rejection by Fox News Channel of an advertisement for The Nation. The left-wing weekly, which has seen its circulation rise dramatically during the Bush presidency-much as the American Spectator's did when Bill Clinton was in office-is showing the sense of humor missing from its editorial content by spending capital on a limited television buy.

While Fox rejected the spot, Bravo, CNN, MSNBC and TBS/TNT accepted the dough, not objecting to this promotion: "[The Nation] peels away layers of obfuscation. Shreds lies. Slices through White House fog. And you can try it for four weeks absolutely free. It's The Nation-America's hottest, most widely read journal of opinion. Nobody owns The Nation-not Time Warner, not Murdoch. So there's no corporate slant, no White House spin, just the straight dope."

Fox, which advertised in the Nation last year, causing serious tsouris among many of the magazine's readers, told Murphy, "I guess we're more selective than others."

It's a little hard to believe that the business department of Fox nixes spots "all the time," but in any case it's their prerogative. TBS/TNT accepted the ad only after the reference to Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch was excised.

Anyway, this minor advertising controversy wouldn't have caught my attention had it not been for a somewhat similar incident back in the mid 90s before the Voice switched to free circulation. New York Press attempted to buy a full-page ad in the Voice, willing to pay its highest rate, promoting the annual "Best of Manhattan" issue. After some hemming and hawing, our publisher at the time was told that then-owner Leonard Stern's management team had rejected the ad. Which, frankly, was what I expected; nevertheless it's kind of funny to see Murphy on his high horse about the evil Murdoch empire when in fact this is the sort of business that goes on all the time.